Take Your Family To The Ball Game, For Less!

If you haven’t been to the ballpark since say, Atlanta Braves ace Tom Glavine's rookie year, 1987, get ready for a severe case of sticker shock.

Spring is here and so is the MLB's 2008 baseball season. Children nationwide are trading their wool beanies for a ball cap and digging their dusty mitts and bats from the closet. If you’re planning on that age-old tradition of treating them to an afternoon of hot dogs, soda and root, root, rooting for the home team, you may want to check your bank balance first.

According to the sports publishing company Team Marketing Report’s “Fan Cost Index,” (FCI) a trip to the ballpark averaged $176.55 for a family of four in 2007. (That includes the price of two average-price adult tickets; two average-price child tickets; two small draft beers; four small sodas; four hot dogs; parking for one car; two game programs and two souvenir caps.) If your local major league team is a major market like Boston, New York or Los Angeles, you’ll need to shell out considerably more: The FCI for those teams respectively, was $313.83, $222.53 and $210.63.

To make matters worse, those numbers are calculated using an “average-price” ticket formula, which doesn’t factor in season tickets. Because parks like Fenway and Yankee Stadium advance-sell large swaths of seats, the average price of available tickets for those parks can go up dramatically, especially for popular games. Stadium-level or loge seats can easily run you $400-a-piece in the Bronx and $312 in Boston.